At Parallo, we believe the best technology starts with people. It’s a principle that sits behind our human-centred design philosophy and shapes how we think about our services. Technology should make things better for the people using it, whether that’s a customer relying on us to manage a critical cloud environment or an engineer responsible for keeping it performing at its best.
That thinking is also why we built our Virtual Cloud Engineer (VCE).
In cloud operations, customer experience is closely connected to context. You can have exceptionally capable engineers, but if they don’t understand the workload they’re supporting, how critical it is, what has changed or how that environment normally behaves, an alert is just an alert. And alerts without context create noise.
At Parallo, we currently handle more than 4,500 cloud alerts every month. As our customer base and the environments we manage grow, that number will grow with them. Simply putting more alerts in front of more engineers isn’t the answer. It increases cognitive load for our people and, ultimately, risks transferring that complexity to our customers.
We wanted to design a better way.
When we started developing VCE, our engineers were the users we designed around. We looked at where their expertise genuinely creates value and where their time was being absorbed by repetitive work: identifying patterns, gathering information and performing the routine first-pass investigation that happens every time an alert fires.
That distinction matters because our engineers bring things technology can’t simply replicate: experience, creativity, customer knowledge and judgement. VCE was designed to give them more capacity to use those skills.
When an alert is triggered, VCE performs the first-pass analysis, bringing together the information and context needed to understand what is happening. Where the evidence shows there is no meaningful availability or performance impact, or an expected change falls within known parameters, the alert may not need to reach an engineer at all. When human attention is required, the engineer arrives already informed and ready to act.
The outcome we’re designing for is surprisingly human: a calmer brain. Less time processing noise means more attention available for the difficult and interesting work of proactively managing cost, performance, security and availability. It also creates an environment where talented people have the space to think, solve problems and find better ways of doing things.
VCE itself is a good example of what can happen when people have that space. It has been passionately developed by our own engineering team in response to a problem they understood first-hand.
“For us, this was never about taking people out of the process. It was about taking away some of the repetitive work that gets in the way of what we’re actually good at. If we’ve got the right context from the start, we have more time and headspace to think, solve the problem and focus on the work where our experience really makes a difference for our customers.”
— Sam Hornby, Technical Lead
Human-centred design doesn’t mean choosing people over technology. It means designing the relationship between them deliberately.
For our customers, that should mean a quieter, faster managed service: fewer alerts that turn out to be noise, quicker attention on the ones that matter, and confidence that when something happens, we already understand the context of their environment rather than rediscovering it every time an alert fires.
For our engineers, it means more time proactively helping customers improve their environments and less time repeatedly working through routine investigations. That matters as cloud environments become more complex. Specialist cloud skills are valuable and finite, and scaling a managed service by simply adding more human effort to more operational noise doesn’t create a better experience for anyone.
There’s a lot of conversation about where AI can replace human effort. We think there’s an equally important question: where can AI create more capacity for people to do their best work?
For Parallo, that means automating what should be automated, using AI where it can genuinely reduce cognitive load and improve the service, and keeping our people focused on the work where creativity, experience, relationships and judgement matter most.
The Virtual Cloud Engineer is one example of that philosophy in practice. We didn’t start with agentic AI and look for somewhere to use it. We started with our people, our customers and a problem worth solving.
That’s human-centred design.